Is your Founder still writing the website copy?
Are your AEs building their own slide decks the night before a pitch?
Does every sales call describe the product slightly differently?
If any of that sounds familiar, you probably need a Marketer. The harder question is which one.
Let's Dive In!
Why the first marketing hire is so easy to get wrong in Cyber
Most security vendors get to Series A on the strength of the founders and a handful of good AEs. The founders know the problem inside out. They have worked in a SOC, or built the detection engine, or sold into CISOs for a decade. The early customers bought them as much as the product.
Then the company raises, the sales team grows, and suddenly the story has to work without the founder in the room.
That is usually when the first marketing job spec gets written. And it is usually written as a wish list: someone who can do positioning, run paid, manage events, write content, rebuild the website and eventually hire a team. That person rarely exists. When a vendor hires the closest match on paper, it tends to get a generalist who is good at a bit of everything and not quite good enough at the one thing the business needs most.
Start with what is actually broken
Before you write the spec, ask your sales team two questions.
First, when you lose a deal, why? If the honest answer is "they did not get what makes us different" or "they went with the vendor that explained it better", your problem is positioning. You need product marketing.
Second, how full is your pipeline? If the message lands when you get in front of people, but you are not in front of enough of them, your problem is volume. You need demand generation.
Most Series A security vendors have a bit of both, but one is almost always louder. Hire for that one first.
The case for Product Marketing first
Security buyers are sceptical, and with good reason. Every vendor claims to stop everything, and CISOs have learned to ignore most of it. A vendor that can explain clearly and specifically what it does, who it is for and why it is different has a real advantage.
A good first product marketer will spend their first ninety days talking to customers, sitting in on sales calls and working with your sales engineers. They will come out of it with a positioning the whole company can repeat, a competitive view sales can use in live deals, and materials that do not need rewriting by an AE at midnight.
It is also far easier to run demand generation on top of a clear message than to fix the message once the campaigns are already running.
The case for Demand Generation first
Sometimes the positioning is already sharp. The founders have done the hard work, win rates are healthy once a deal is in play, and the real problem is simply that the pipeline is thin.
In that case a product marketer can feel like a delay. What you need is someone who will take a pipeline target, build a programme across events, email, paid and partners, and be measured on it from the first month.
The trap is hiring someone whose experience is running large budgets at an enterprise vendor. At Series A your demand generation hire has to build from scratch, often with a small budget and no marketing operations support.
What to look for either way
Whichever route you take, a few things matter more in cyber than in general SaaS.
Credibility with a technical buyer. Ask candidates to explain your category back to you as if you were a CISO. If they reach for fear, buzzwords or vague claims about AI, that is what your buyers will hear too.
A good relationship with sales engineers. In security the SEs often hold the most accurate version of the product story. Marketers who seek them out produce better work.
Comfort with a long cycle. Proof-of-concepts, security reviews and procurement all slow deals down. Marketing has to support the whole cycle, not just the first meeting.
Stage fit. Your first marketer has to do the work themselves. Someone who has only ever run a team of ten may struggle without one.
When to hire a Head of Marketing instead
Some founders want to start with a VP or head of marketing and let them build the team. That can work, particularly if you are about to expand into the US or are preparing for a bigger round and need someone senior to own the plan.
But a senior leader with no team will often spend their first six months hiring rather than doing. If the business needs positioning or pipeline now, a strong hands-on hire first, with a leader added later, is usually the quicker route.
Back to the Founder writing the website
If that is still you, it is a sign the business has outgrown the founder doing everything. The first marketing hire is what lets the story travel without you in the room.
We recruit marketing, sales and customer success teams for cybersecurity vendors, and we are always happy to talk through what your first or next marketing hire should look like. You can book a call if you would like to talk it through.
Iwan Robertson
Global Business Development Manager
